My Chastity Blanket

HOME GOODS: the only place you can get teacher appreciation gifts, snacks for Maya’s team dinner, a new container for my chia seeds, and avocado wrapping paper.

My go-to pre-workout snack.

Lunch. SO easy. Just added some sweet potatoes, dressing, and kimchi.

A must.

Our oats soaking in their little bath for tomorrow.

The kids do their DHA daily, and Vitamin D every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

INCREDIBLE transformation by an incredible girl 😉

One of my Mom Friends, Jess, sent me a picture of her grocery lineup. SO good! Only thing I might change is going for an unsweetened, full fat option for kefir…but, that’s not a bad place to start with that stuff as it takes some getting used to 😉 GOOD JOB, GIRLFRIEND!

Here’s the situation.

Remember about a month ago Ben talked me into getting a $250 King sized gravity/weighted blanket to help improve our sleep? He was all gung ho (is that even how you spell that?) about getting the heaviest option at 25 lbs. because he said, and may I quote, “If it gets you one extra hour of sleep, it’s worth it.”

We’re talking he insisted we get one.

So, we did.

And, the first night, I slept like a baby all night long. First time in months. And, since then, my quality of sleep has taken a complete 180 turn for the better. Some things took a turn for the worse, like the fact that we completely stopped snuggling at all during the night. But, I was sleeping like a zombie.

While Ben laid there staring at the ceiling all night.

A week ago, Ben declared, “I HATE THAT BLANKET.”

So, we compromised: I returned the 25 lb. King sized one for a 15 lb. individual sized one.

It kind of worked. We started wrapping ankles again, but that was the extent of our snuggling.

Last night, I decided to be the good partner and I left what Ben’s been calling my “Chastity Blanket” in the closet.

For the night.

Lemme’ tell you how much sleep I got.

It felt sort of what it felt like when we had a newborn…that was about 2.5 weeks old. You know, when you’ve gone that long without a good night’s sleep. Or, when I came home from shoulder surgery and couldn’t sleep more than 20 minutes a night…and, I was falling asleep at Maya’s basketball games.

Except, I am fully aware that I am being overdramatic because it was one night.

Anyway, the point is I woke up feeling like I was hungover, but I didn’t even have the pleasure of having a few cocktails the night before.

It was a rough morning over here, you guys. Not going into the nasty little details, but there may or may not have been lots of crying, lots of people being physically rushed around, and lots of ultimatums getting tossed around.

When we got in the car finally and I had a second to pull myself together to try and have a calm, civilized “lecture” with Bode, I said something like, “You need to understand that crying and complaining doesn’t make anything better. It just makes an already difficult situation that much more difficult. You have the choice to either move on from something that isn’t going the way that you want it, or let it keep making you sad and frustrated for longer than it needs to.”

Then, I said goodbye to him at the farm and sent him along his way.

What happened after that? I did the exact opposite of what I told him.

Maya called and I gave her a hard time about going to Starbuck’s so much and dumped all of the stress from my morning on her when she asked if I was ok.

I got SUPER irritated at, like 5 different cars and 3 pedestrians that slowed me down on my way to the gym.

And, when I got into the meat of my workout, I cried my way…like, actually cried out loud…through 600 meters of a sled drag and if it had been 610 meters I would’ve ended up with my exercise-induced asthma issue that I get when I start panicking over how I’m not performing the way I “think” I should be.

Do you see what I did? I let my lack of sleep and “bad morning” keep spilling over hour by hour instead of just coming to terms with it and moving on normally with the rest of my day.

I was crying in the middle of a workout for absolutely no good reason.

How ridiculous is that?

It’s just a choice we make. The event happened. I got no sleep. But, I reacted emotionally and let it dictate the rest of my day instead of just responding by letting it happen and then being my normal happy, positive self.

It’s just a choice that we have every power over making one way or another.

About Me

Heather Keenan Bergeron lives in Natick, Massachusetts with her husband, Ben, and kids Maya (18), Jonah (14), Bode (6), and Harley Love (4). They own CrossFit New England and where they train and coach with their best friends. HB Unfiltered is a daily updated blog where super dysfunctional living is both exposed and celebrated through writing and the 39,000+ photos taken on Heather’s iPhone